Writerly Wednesdays

Putting the Sci in Sci-Fi

I’ve written before about world-building, focusing on the art of weaving it into the body of our stories. It’s a necessary part of pretty much any genre of fiction to one degree or another, but particularly in speculative and historical fiction. Right now, I’m going to focus on a different aspect of world-building, specifically in science fiction.

Forget working in the details. I want to talk about whether the details work.

It’s science fiction, right? Fiction, as in made up. Yeah, but you also have the ‘science’ part. You want things to be a little out there, imaginative, something the reader hasn’t thought of before, but now that you suggested it, “Yes, that’s so awesome!” At the same time, you don’t want it to enter the realm of, “But that’s totally impossible!”

Finding the balance between scientific feasibility and creative license isn’t easy. I don’t think I know any writers who don’t dive in and do some research when they find they need to. There are natural limitations. (For example, check out the letter Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry sent Isaac Asimov in response to the latter’s criticism of the television series.)

However, I’ve come across instances where I feel like authors didn’t realize they needed to do a little research. Maybe they lacked the background knowledge. Maybe they just didn’t think it through from the angle I naturally look from. Maybe they put more emphasis on what worked for their plot than what actually works from a logical world-building perspective.

Maybe I’m just a science snob.

To be honest, I see this particularly in YA sci-fi. Not saying it’s true of all (not remotely!) or most. I hope it’s not even true of many. But it’s certainly true of some. Some who call themselves geeks, love sci-fi as a consumer, but don’t get the whole left-side-of-the-brain engagement going in their writing.

I’m not saying all sci-fi has to be hard sci-fi. We don’t need pages of techno-babble backing up the scientific elements of the story. But here are some (very general) scientifically minded questions I try to consider in my world-building details:

• What progression led to the present level of technology in the world? Is it ascending (advancing technology) or descending (lost knowledge due to some event in the past)?

 

• What limitations are there, preventing all tasks from being dirt simple? If technology makes some things super-simple, but others still require effort, does that distinction make sense?

• If my setting is Earth, but X years in the future, how do elements of our current world influence my story? How have elements of our present degraded over time? (Never forget entropy.)

And here’s a biggie:

• What laws of physics (as currently understood) am I going to try to break, bend, or circumvent? How can I justify it? (The justification can be highly fictional, but must be consistent within itself.)

Any other sci-fi buffs out there? Are there ways you see the “sci” in sci-fi getting glossed over too much (in YA or otherwise)? What strategies do you have for keeping your imagination within some confines of scientific consistency? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Confessions of a Late Bloomer

I’ve heard it more than once. Possibly more than a hundred times. Likely from some of you reading this post. Countless writers have said some version of the following:

If you’ve said one of those things, totally cool. Nothing wrong with that. (Unless you mention any of the above in your query letter. DON’T do it!) Some people have that direction and solid idea of where they want to go in life early.

I’m not one of those people.

To be fair, I’ve always been a bookworm. But as a kid/teen, I never got enthralled by gorgeous prose or amazing imagery. I just wanted a story that could hold my interest, keep me guessing, suck me in to the very end and beyond.

To be even more fair, I’ve always known I’m pretty good with words. I could write a school essay on just about any topic without breaking a sweat. (Very handy in grad school.) When my sister needed to argue with someone on a message board, she got me to help her phrase everything just right.

That didn’t make me a writer. Writers were creative and imaginative and all those good things.

We had to take two English classes in college. Freshman English (which I managed to delay well beyond freshman year) and some type of Advanced English chosen from a list. I chose Technical Writing. Never considered taking any type of creative writing class.

I wasn’t the type.

So what am I now?

Over the past three years, I’ve slowly grown used to the idea that there is some creativity in me. That while my writing style will never be “conventionally beautiful,” there is artistic merit in it. That the strong analytical side I’ve been so comfortable with all my life can be a complement to creativity.

I think I’m old enough now to understand that while there are many types, there isn’t one correct type. My “writerliness” is just as real as that of someone who’s been spinning stories since toddlerhood.

Some people take the interstate to their goals. Others take mountainous backroads, and an unplanned detour leads to an unexpected destination. One isn’t better (or worse) than the other.

Just different.

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Where Does Your Idea-Spawner Dwell?

“Where do you get the ideas for your stories?”

I haven’t even been at this very long, and I’ve already lost count how many times I’ve been asked that. Maybe it hasn’t been that many. Maybe I’m just blocking the memories because my answer often seems to be, “Um, well … I don’t know. Places.”

Part of the problem is that no two stories have had the same clear-cut idea-spawning process. One came from a line of lyrics that I thought I’d heard wrong. One came from experiences I saw repeating for a certain subset of my students, and I realized I could fictionalize the essence of it. Most of the others, I don’t have a solid memory of where they came from. One little germ of a thought smooshed into another, then another. A main character, a premise, a plot … they just kind of evolved. By the time I had the full “idea” in my head, I couldn’t remember how I got to that original germ in the first place.

Another thing I’ve lost count of is how many times I’ve heard other authors say they’ve gotten ideas from dreams. Tons of them saying they have to keep a notepad on the nightstand so when they wake from a dream that’ll make an awesome story, they can jot down the important points before it slips from their minds.

I have a confession. My dreams are utterly useless to me as a writer.

I can’t say they’re necessarily boring. They’re just either too ordinary or too weird to make good story fodder. A lot of my dreams involve mash-ups of my current life with older memories. I’m at school, and I’m supposed to go teach something, but I’m also a student again, and it’s supposed to be my high school, but it’s more like classrooms from the deaf school I interned at got transplanted to my junior high building. The supporting characters are a mix of people I went to school with and kids I’ve taught at various stages of my career.

Oh, and the best part is when some people are using ASL while others are speaking, and it almost never matches up with who would be doing each in real life.

(Someone’s going to waltz in and do a dream analysis on this, declaring my subconscious to be either really dull or really messed up, right?)

The good news is, it doesn’t really matter where the ideas come from, as long as they come. Maybe it’s on my mind because I’m wondering where I’ll find the next one.

Do your ideas tend to spawn in ways that are easy for you to pinpoint? Or are they a little more amorphous as they sneak up on you?

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Gauging the Awesome

I’ve been hearing it for a while. Want to get an agent? The most important piece of the puzzle is to be awesome. Write an awesome query to get an agent’s attention, and make sure you’re ready to back it up with an awesome manuscript.

Okay, but how do you know when you’ve arrived at “awesome”?

It’s not easy. The first thing I had to accept was that I might be wrong. I wouldn’t really know. The best I could do was have a really strong belief. I also tried to keep my mind open to a need to increase the awesome.

There’s a line between “If I don’t believe in my work, why should anyone else?” and “I’ve written the most amazing novel ever and how dare anyone say I change a single thing?” It’s a thin line, and crossing to the wrong side isn’t pretty. Keeping my self-assessments honest can be a battle between my perfectionism and occasional surges of ego.

It doesn’t help when there are plenty of outside-our-control reasons for agents not to nibble. Our timing may be off trend-wise. Maybe we’re hitting agents who just signed something too similar.

Maybe the work just isn’t awesome enough (yet).

That doesn’t mean it isn’t awesome at all. Maybe it’s pretty-darn awesome, just not holy-whoa awesome.

I thought my earlier manuscripts were awesome enough. In fact, I still think there’s a lot of awesome in them. At the same time, there’s something great about retrospect. When I look back over my querying experiences, there was something different this last round—the round that resulted in signing with my agent. A different gut-feeling when I said to myself, “This bird is ready to fly.”

Thing is, I can only recognize that from here. At the time, all I could do was hope.

And keep working.

Because no amount of awesome is ever really enough, right?

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Don’t Take that Tone with Me!

It’s one thing when you’re communicating face-to-face. When someone’s “taking a tone” with you, it’s usually pretty obvious. Take the conversation to the realm of the written word, though, and suddenly there’s more than enough room for interpretation.

As a novelist, it’s tricky enough to make sure a character’s tone matches the intention. I remember I once had a reader of one of my early manuscripts say, “Man, he’s being a little harsh.” I looked at the line of dialogue, mystified. Then I realized my reader (a teenager) was assuming a sarcastic tone for the brief statement. Not at all what I intended.

Did I tell her she was wrong and skip happily on my way? Nope. I adjusted the line and the information surrounding it so the intended tone came across more clearly.

Real-time conversations by text can be so much worse if we’re not careful. That’s why emoticons were invented, right? To give an extra cue of whether we’re teasing or annoyed or uncertain? (I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds good, and it’s why I use them.)

What if one of our online compadres says, “Hey, on that post over there, you’re coming across kind of (insert undesirable trait)”? Do we say, “That’s not what I meant at all,” and continue on without changing? Hopefully not. The fact I know what I meant is irrelevant. How it’s taken by those reading is more important.

I may need to adjust my approach in the future, make sure my tone is more clear without the benefit of facial expression, vocal tone, body language, and all the other cues we use in real life. If I learn how to do that, who knows? Maybe it’ll make me a better writer in general.

Have you had any experiences with misunderstanding tone or having your own misunderstood? Any tips or tricks for making tone clear in writing?

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Crushing the Contest Curse

Some of you know I haven’t had the greatest history with contests. I’d only entered two—well, the same one, two years in a row. I got through the initial slush round both times. When it came to the agent judging/voting round, however … silence.

Ouch.

All the things people say about subjectivity, not the right mix of agents for you, etc. are true. Someone thought my work was good enough to put me through the slush.

Those true words don’t stop the hurt. The feeling that readers and other writers may appreciate aspects of my writing, but to the “people who matter,” I’ll never be good enough. The conviction that I’m doing something wrong and no one can tell me what.

Or maybe someone could tell me. They just don’t.

I kept writing, kept revising, kept querying. With each story, I’ve gotten better. I know that. But I figured contests weren’t for me. The sting of public silence was too much.

Then a couple of friends talked me into trying one more contest. (Okay, they didn’t have to try that hard. Mostly it kept coming up in conversation and they said, “Yeah, you should.”)

Maybe I’m just a masochist at heart.

I got picked by a coach, thus getting through the slush again.

Monday was agent voting day. One or two votes meant partial requests. Three or more meant full requests.

Would I suffer silence again?

No. Not this time. Five votes. Five full requests.

Nothing is guaranteed. An agent still has to love the whole manuscript enough to offer representation, and that’s a whole different hurdle. The point for now is that when I was put up next to lots of really stellar work, I still caught some eyes. That feels really good.

But I still remember how the silence felt.

If you’ve suffered the silence, it’s okay that it hurts. I’m a big believer in letting yourself wallow for a day or so, but only if you definitively cut off that wallowing before it does some damage. Keep working on the story you’ve got, or start working on a new one. Tweak your query or opening pages. Do some research on which agents are most likely to love your story.

Hope that you hit the right agent at the right time with the right story, because it takes a little luck. I’m not one to say we will make it if we keep working, because no one knows that. The only thing I know is that if we stop writing and stop trying, failure is guaranteed.

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